


Can't Speak The Fear (House of Hitsugaya #4)

by Gigai



Series: House of Hitsugaya [4]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:42:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29770149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gigai/pseuds/Gigai
Summary: The House of Hitsugaya series is a collection of chronological short stories from the first person POV of Toushiro Hitsugaya, beginning with his promotion to captain about 19 years before the manga starts.In this story, Momo demonstrates her capability to be a Vice-Captain, but it only reminds Toushiro of the past.
Series: House of Hitsugaya [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125452
Kudos: 7





	1. Chapter 1

It was chillier now. The air had a real bite to it once the sun set, and the leaves had caught fire in ombres of red and yellow and gold-green flecked with orange.

“Hee-ey! You know, you could just have somebody come fix that!”

Hinamori’s shout made me jump a little, and I managed to avoid smashing my thumb with the mallet I held.

The tile cracked, instead.

“ _Hinamori…_ ”

She vanished for a moment, and I could hear her climbing the ladder before she popped over the edge, still clutching the ladder poles. “You know, you don’t have to call me that when we’re at home. No one’s gonna hear you, Shiro.”

“Captain Hitsugaya,” I muttered. “And can you bring me another clay tile? I want to get this patched before it rains.”

“Seriously, don’t captains make a lot of money?” Hinamori asked. “I’ll help pay for it too. Let’s get someone to patch it up, before you break any more.”

“It’s a roof tile, not surgery,” I said with a sigh. “Just bring me one, would you?”

She vanished for a few moments, popping back up with another of the arched clay tiles to hand over. “Are you going to come to my demonstration tomorrow?”

I lightly tapped the tile into place, making sure the nails held this time. The leak had ruined one of the tatami mats in Grandma’s house, and since I’d been visiting, I’d figured I might as well fix it right away.

Which was why I was currently in a ratty old kimono I hadn’t worn in years, straddling the ridgepole of our house in Junrinan, trying to replace the stupid thing. “Maybe.”

“Oh, come on! I really want you to come!”

I didn’t know what to say to that. She’d been bouncing around for almost a week straight now, ever since that captain she worked for had decided that a demonstration of her abilities was the perfect way to decide if she was ready to take on a vice-captain’s role.

I though it was weird, but I couldn’t really say that without hurting her feelings. The fact was, most captains decided who their second-in-command was simply by observing their subordinates and picking someone that was respected, well-liked, and talented. That was a matter of perspective best left to the captain who was going to be working with them, and it was fairly rare to have any sort of demonstration, formal or otherwise, to determine a vice-captain.

The only real reason to do it at all was usually if someone’s capability was likely to be called into question – combat against the squad’s captain was a good way to showcase the new vice-captain’s talents and remind the squad why the captain was in charge in the first place.

I didn’t like that idea. Hinamori was annoying sometimes, and stubborn as I was, but she was also a genuinely kind, sunny personality, and I couldn’t really see her in combat.

Hollows, sure – she’d easily proved herself capable of that back in her academy days. I didn’t have any concerns about that, as long as the hollow wasn’t extraordinarily strong.

But being a shinigami meant fighting anyone that was an enemy to us, and sometimes –

My hand tightened on the mallet.

Sometimes that meant striking down other men and women.

I didn’t know if she could handle that.

_I don’t really know if I ever “handled” it, either…_

So far, all I’d killed was hollows. Even that time that I wanted to forget about, I’d raised my sword in self-defense, rather than murderous intent.

Maybe I didn’t have any right to judge whether or not she’d be able to deal with that weight, when the time came.

“Shiro?”

I swallowed. “…why’s he having you put on a show, anyway?”

She climbed the rest of the way up and perched on the roof edge, swinging her feet carelessly. “I’m better with kido than a lot of the squad members, but I don’t get much chance to show it off. Captain Aizen thought a demonstration would be a good idea!”

“Seems like _he’s_ the one choosing a vice-captain,” I muttered. “What’s the point of making it seem like the entire squad gets to choose?”

She sighed. “It’s fun, isn’t it? People enjoy watching captains showing off now and then – it’s not like they have much chance to draw their swords right now, right?”

I couldn’t argue with that, really. Captain’s Shiba’s disturbingly unexplained death aside, the last few months had been pretty boring. I’d appointed a few new officers, sent out one notice of death to a subordinate’s family members, and scheduled regular patrols in our areas of the World of the Living. I’d even doubled patrols in the areas where the Captain had last been spotted, but there was no real sign of trouble. Just run-of-the-mill hollows and the occasional drunken infraction I needed to deal with.

Soldiers were soldiers, after all.

“You’re asking me to go watch you get the stuffing kicked out of you by your captain,” I said finally, settling for honesty over tact. “I don’t really want to have to watch you get hurt.”

Hinamori blinked for a moment, clearly surprised, then clambered up to sit on the ridgepole with me, bare toes digging into the little footholds the curved tiles provided.

“Shiro, I’m not going to get hurt, you know? It’s just a demonstration! We’ll both be holding back, so no one will get injured.”

“I don’t want you fighting a captain,” I said quietly. “I don’t think you need to prove anything to anybody. You’ve worked really hard, haven’t you? You’ve been practicing for years.”

“I’ve fought him before,” Hinamori pointed out, and I winced. “For training.”

“It’s just… never mind.”

“Oh come on! You can be a captain, but I can’t be a vice-captain?” she said, sounding hurt.

I could tease Hinamori all day long while she was huffing and pouting and needling me back, but I couldn’t deal with her sounding like that. “No. That’s not it, Momo … I just …”

“You just what?”

“…you might have to kill more than hollows, someday.”

She traced one toe along the bumps in the tiles. They were rough slabs of clay that had been baked hard, but they weren’t polished or painted like the ones in the Seireitei were. “If I have to, I guess I have to.”

“It’s not that easy,” I said, a flush of humiliation spreading clear up to my ears as my voice cracked. It didn’t happen often, but it annoyed me when it did. “I don’t want _my_ sister to have to kill people.”

She looked at me for a moment, then gave me a hug. “I don’t want my little brother to have to kill people either,” she said gently, and my eyes smarted for a moment.

_Too late._

I’d never told anyone about what had happened that day. I’d been given a new uniform, unsplashed with the blood of my best friend, and I’d gone back to my room and tried to sleep, and failed.

After a week of barely speaking in classes and shuffling through the days like they were memories, Hinamori had threatened to tell Grandma if I didn’t tell her what was wrong.

I’d lied and said my stomach hurt.

She didn’t believe me, but when I started pretending to be myself again, she’d had no choice but to go along with it.

When Kusaka’s death was finally announced almost a week later, due to a training mission, she’d immediately decided I must have “known” somehow that my friend was in trouble, and that felt even worse. I didn’t want to be praised for what a good friend I’d been to him.

I’d been a terrible friend.

I wanted to talk to someone, honestly. It was painful, and scary, and sad, and it still knotted my stomach when I least expected it, but I couldn’t get the words past my throat.

What if Grandma hated me, after I told her that?

What if Hinamori stopped speaking to me?

I was more scared of losing them than the abrupt unfairness of my friend’s death, and so I still hadn’t told anyone anything about that day.

“Shiro?”

I jerked away from the hug, like it burned. “What.”

“You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

_Nope._ “Sure.”

She sighed. “Sometimes I wish I knew what you were thinking…”

“…I’ll come.” I said, unwillingly. “I’ll definitely come.”

Hinamori beamed, and somehow that made me feel worse.

I didn’t want to see her get hurt, but there were a lot of kinds of hurting, and I was worried her insides would feel the way mine did now, on the days when I couldn’t stop seeing the blood spraying from Kusaka’s neck.

I stared into the setting sun for a moment, trying to imprint that sunset on my mind, then stood and clambered down the ladder.

“Don’t look up!” Hinamori said, following me down, and my thoughts of death were momentarily replaced with something more horrifying.

“Gross. Who’d wanna do that?” I said.

“Don’t be mean!”

“Well, don’t be gross, then.” I waited for her to reach the bottom, then pulled the ladder down.

Not how I’d expected to spend my day off, but I didn’t mind.

I wasn’t looking forwards to tomorrow, though.

Hinamori helped me carry the ladder back into the shed behind the house, practically beaming from the promise she’d extracted from me. It made me want to sigh in exasperation and tell her not to be so simple-minded, but it made me want to cry, too.

_No one should have that much faith in me._


	2. Can't Speak The Fear 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The House of Hitsugaya series is a collection of chronological short stories from the first person POV of Toushiro Hitsugaya, beginning with his promotion to captain about 19 years before the manga starts.
> 
> In this story, Momo demonstrates her capability to be a Vice-Captain, but it only reminds Toushiro of the past.

_“You’re new, huh?”_

_“…yeah,” I said, glancing up from the book I’d been studying. The material wasn’t that difficult, and I was already kind of bored._

_The guy in front of me had the long black hair of a minor noble, sleek and shiny and pinned up in back to keep it out of his face. His eyes were sharp and quick, but he seemed genuinely friendly, and he was easily several heads taller than me._

_Well, that was nothing new. Pretty much everyone was taller than me, here._

_“Everyone says you’re that boy genius that just started,” the guy continued, grinning. “Let’s be friends, all right?”_

_…weird. I’d never met anyone who wanted to just casually saunter up to me and be friends. Usually people avoided me._

_“I’m Kusaka Soujiro.”_

_“Toushiro Hitsugaya,” I said. “You need something?”_

_“What, you don’t want to be friends?”_

_“I didn’t say that. It’s just weird, that’s all.”_

_Kusaka looked taken aback by my bluntness. “What’s weird about it?”_

_I sighed and shut my book. “I dunno, maybe that I’ve been here a month already and the only people that come to talk to me are the ones that want to stare.”_

_“I’m not here to stare. Honest. I think a lot of people are just intimidated by you, that’s all.”_

_“That’s their problem, not mine,” I said, getting up._

_“I think you’re probably right about that, but I wouldn’t say it to their faces or anything.”_

_Grandma had warned me about it before I had taken the test. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down._

_In other words, don’t even think about being so exceptional that you stand out in a crowd. Society takes people like that and humbles them._

_I got it, sort of. Nobody likes a show off, and bragging was pretty obnoxious too._

_Still, if I was doing something amazing, why did I have to hold back to make everyone feel better about themselves? Why couldn’t they just try harder?_

_“Hey.”_

_I got up, ignoring Kusaka._

_“Hey, come on. Give me a chance to at least talk to you before you decide you don’t want anything to do with me.”_

_“You know they’re just going to make fun of you, right?” I said. “For talking to me? They’ll say you’re doing so badly in classes you need the help of that genius brat that’s still a first year.”_

_“Probably.” Kusaka shrugged. He seemed indifferent to the idea._

_“And?”_

_“Sounds like their problem, not mine,” he said cheerfully, tossing my own words back at me._

_I stared at him._

_I had no clue what to make of this guy._

_“I came here to learn to be a shinigami,” Kusaka said. “To get stronger. To push myself. The Court Guard Squads don’t take slackers, or fools, or anyone who expects to skate by on their family name. There’s almost five hundred of us here, you know. They only take the top twenty percent. Everyone else gets their spiritual pressure sealed and they’re sent home, or they volunteer to be an enlisted man in one of the hollow-killer squads.”_

_I nodded. I’d heard of those squads. They weren’t officers, or even proper shinigami that were recognized as such. They were the washouts of the academy, the ones too prideful, stubborn, or battle-crazed to submit to having their sub-par abilities sealed. They still reported to the Captain-Commander, but their primary goal was to seek out hollows and destroy them no matter what. Unlike squads that patrolled specific areas of the Seireitei and the World of the Living, the killer squads simply roamed from fight to fight, receiving reinforcements as needed._

_Sometimes those guys distinguished themselves enough to make it into the actual Court Guard Squads, but most of the time they just died. Sooner or later, a life like that took its toll._

_“I’m going to get into the Court Guard Squads,” I said quietly. “So’s my sister.”_

_“What? Nobody mentioned you had a sister! So she’s some prodigy like you, huh?”_

_“You’d have to ask her that,” I said wearily._

_“Introduce me?”_

_“Not a chance,” I said coldly, and Kusaka grinned._

_“Fair enough. Hey, wait up! Mind if I walk with you?”_

“No. Don’t.”

Don’t come near me. Walk away. It won’t save you, but if you walk away…

_“I guess,” I said._

It wasn’t the first time I’d had this dream. I was always stuck watching, shouting at myself to stop talking to him.

I never did. He was the first real friend I’d made, and I’d been happy, even if it had taken me a while to admit it.

_“You could at least be a little nicer,” Kusaka said, his voice growing raspy, and younger me turned to look at him, uncomprehending as blood ran down his neck, a wound opening suddenly. “Since you’re going to kill me later.”_

I strangled the yell as I sat up, shoulders heaving. The room felt hot, and there was a rivulet of sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades.

_It didn’t happen like that. It didn’t happen._

The room was suddenly freezing, and I watched the frost creep across the tatami, spreading out from my futon for a moment before I caught myself and regained control.

How many years had it been now?

That dream was still way too vivid.

I got up, shakily, managing to make it to the toilet before I threw up.

_No more. I don’t want to see anymore._

This was never what I’d wanted, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I knew it wasn’t really my fault, but I couldn’t accept that. I didn’t want to accept it.

There had to have been something I could have done.

It was a poisonous thought, and one anybody that fought for a living knew better than to take seriously – let that doubt creep in and feast, and there was no going back from it. Once you’d lost your confidence, that was it. There was no way to convince yourself that these things happened, and the second-guessing and self-doubt would ruin your ability to fight, let alone command men.

I splashed water over my face and drank some from my cupped hands, spitting to wash the taste away before stripping to the waist and washing away the sweat.

I knew it, but that wasn’t making the dreams stop.

By the time I made it back to my room, the sun had started to rise. It was still quiet, save for the few shinigami patrolling the outskirts of the building on the night watch.

I pulled the door shut and lit a small lamp.

_Maybe I’ll just read for a while…_

Hinamori was going to fight her captain today. Maybe that’s what brought it on.

Something awful was going to happen today. I could feel it.

I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bleach and all related characters belong to Tite Kubo.  
> If you liked this story and want more (and faster), buy me a soul candy here: https://ko-fi.com/gigai
> 
> Reference Notes:
> 
> One of the things I feel like Bleach always glossed over was the actual effects some of the killing and bloodshed and fighting would have on the younger shinigami (obviously it wasn't intended to be Attack on Titan or something, so it's not a criticism, too much angsting would have made it tedious to read). Still, I think a lot of Toushiro's personality gets boiled down to "he's super serious all the time and has no sense of humor", and I've never felt like that was a particularly fair way to portray him. He's young, he's clearly talented (which is just as likely to get you singled out and bullied in Japan's school system), he's introverted, and he's socially awkward. Then he sort of watches his first real friend get murdered when he's barely 9 or 10, and his captain vanishes without a trace before he's even a teenager yet and he ends up running a whole squad of soldiers.
> 
> Like Aizen manages to figure out, he may act very mature for his age, but he's still a kid, and he has a lot of those obvious vulnerabilities and fears.
> 
> Planning for a much longer chapter next week, since I'll have my script for Season 11 of The Wicked Library finished!

**Author's Note:**

> Bleach and all related characters belong to Tite Kubo.  
> If you liked this story and want more (and faster), buy me a soul candy here: https://ko-fi.com/gigai
> 
> Reference Notes:
> 
> Oh my god, no reference notes? NONE?!? It's a miracle! (I'm sure as the story continues I'll end up with a few). I've finally got enough plot and timeline documented to not need a mini-dissertation on everything.
> 
> Apologies again for the skipped week - the new job is going well and the pain from my disability has also eased up, so I'm hoping to avoid missing any more for a while. I'd like to actually hit the "start" of Bleach by the end of the year, so I can't afford to skip weeks!
> 
> Slightly shorter chapters for a bit, as I'm trying to finish up a story I was invited to write for Season 11 of The Wicked Library! It's going to be a fun dystopian jaunt about tarot cards and the end of the world, and I'm looking forward to hearing someone narrate it!


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